left

Lefbit
Tutorial
Rename
Snarf
Leaping through the text
Finding a word
Director
Counter
Saving
Line break

Left is graphical plain-text editor written in Uxntal. Left doesn't do much, but packs many useful features in a tiny 13kb rom.

It supports Uxntal syntax highlight, proportional text, inline images and the snarf buffer. The alt key is used as a LEAP key to navigate the body of the text. This version is updated regularly.

To view the documentation for the former version of Left, see left electron.

Both the Uxn and Electron versions are available on itch.io.

Download Left

Distributions

The first version of Left was released on itch.io for desktop in 2017.

We have since released many more versions of Left. A web version was initially created to help Rek with the writing of Wiktopher.

In 2021, Left was re-written as a lightweight graphical text editor for the uxn system.

Getting Started

Left is distributed as a rom for the Uxn system, you must have an emulator available for your machine, for more details, see the Uxn Guide. To begin, navigate to the folder in which you want your project files to be saved, and enter the following to launch the left.rom:

./path/to/uxnemu ~/roms/left.rom

Controls

alt + mouse2: find from top
ctrl + mouse2: cut and find
backspace/delete: erase
escape: deselect
arrow: move
ctrl + up: next label
ctrl + down: prev label
ctrl + left: end of line
ctrl + right: start of line
alt + left: next word
alt + right: prev word
shift + arrow: scale selection
ctrl + a: select all

Tutorial

Renaming a file

To rename a file, press ctrl + r and save it with a .txt extension.

Snarf

It is not possible to copy text from another document to paste directly into Left, but it is possible using a .snarf file. To do this, open the command line (making sure you're in the same project file) and type:

cat > .snarf

Paste your text, press enter and exit with ctrl + c. Then, select the text, copy it and paste it in your Left file.

Leap

The alt key is used as a LEAP key(YouTube) to navigate the body of the text.

Finding a word

Finding a word is done by holding down the alt key, and typing characters, and releasing alt to jump. Alternatively, you can select a word with mouse2, and jump to the next instance with mouse3.

mouse1: select character
mouse2: select word
mouse3: find

Counter

At the top right corner of the window, there are 4 sets of digits (can be either numbers, or letters). Depending on what is selected, this number will mean different things.

If moving forward or backward with the arrow keys, the number will indicate the position of the cursor and of the character in the window. If selecting a bit of text, the number will count up the number of characters in the selection.

Saving a file

To save a file, press ctrl + s.

At the top left corner of the window is a diamond shape, it changes color to indicate whether or not you have unsaved changes.

Linebreak

If you skip a line, a diamond shape will mark the line break.

license

The license applies to all the documented projects, the projects themselves and their assets. The source code of this website and our apps are under the MIT License, but the assets and text content of this website and of our apps are under the BY-NC-SA4.0 License. We are happy to pass knowledge, and that others can learn from our projects, improve on them, or make them into something else that is useful, but please, do not try to sell our projects as is under a different name. Doing so is very lazy, and disrespectful to us.

DO NOT resell or mint our work.

You can find our more recent projects on Sourcehut.

pull request

See the Github and Sourcehut repositories. Pull Requests are welcome, but please read our design philosophy first.